


some by virtue fall

by StarryCleric



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Ben Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Illness, Injury, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Number Five | The Boy-centric, Reginald Hargreeves' A+ Parenting, Time Travel, it's an extended physics metaphor folks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-13 05:24:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19244701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarryCleric/pseuds/StarryCleric
Summary: The real tragedy is that, despite theoretically infinite access to all of time and space, Five always seems to come up just a little bit short.Or, a glimpse into Number Five Hargreeves, told in four dimensions.





	some by virtue fall

**The first dimension: a set of infinite zero dimensional points along a line; length.**

The date is October 13, 1938. The sunset paints the sky a beautiful palette of orange and pink at the horizon while the first stars blink into view against the changing purples and blues. Most of the stores and offices have closed for the day and the workers have gone home to see their families, but the doctor’s office at 26 West Federal Street still has its lights on. Although all the shades have been pulled down, a discerning eye could easily make out the shadowy figures of a man and a woman still puttering about inside.

Across the street, on the second floor of a barber shop that was abandoned by the owners years ago at the start of the Great Depression, Number Five stares down the scope of his rifle, keeping the man firmly in his crosshairs. His shoulders and knees ache in a dull, detached manner that only serves to remind him that crouching and kneeling all day is hell on anyone’s joints, and he’s not as young as he used to be.

He wasn’t told what Dr. Eugene Simmons had done to necessitate his removal from the timeline when he traveled to 1938 yesterday morning, but this isn’t Five’s first rodeo, and he knows damn well that any questions he asks will be met with absolute silence at best, and an official inquiry into his own fitness as an agent at worst. If there’s one thing he won’t risk, it’s his status at the Commission and his best chance to finally get back home and actually fix things.

It wouldn’t be too hard to calculate why, exactly, Eugene has been marked for immediate removal. The only instructions he’d received were to keep things as quick as possible, with no witnesses whatsoever, but after watching the man for two days, Five has pieced together enough of the story to start running the numbers in his head and find the deviation. Frequent trips in and out of a backroom, wringing hands and excessive sweating, a hurried conversation with two clearly armed men around noon who left with several brown paper packages. Clearly some sort of deal had gone wrong, perhaps whatever money that had kept the doctor’s office open and running through the whole Depression needed to be repaid, and rather than letting the mob evaluate the merits of having their own doctor versus the drain on their resources, Five was here to make the decision for them.

The sun is now well below the horizon, and Five is forced to roll his shoulders and adjust his position in a futile effort to get some of the tension out of his muscles. His hand cramps around the trigger, but it wouldn’t do to let Eugene out of his sight now. The man and the woman’s shadows in the window are now clearly embracing. Five fights the urge to roll his eyes. They’re too close together for Five to get anything close to a clean shot at the man’s head, and now his mental calculations would have to be adjusted to include an extramarital affair if he wanted to puzzle out why Eugene was slated for termination.

He shakes his head slightly, letting himself settle back into the blank mindset he’s had for most of the past 48 hours. Probability maps and questions of “why” didn’t matter, now. All that mattered was calculating the trajectory of the bullet in his gun into Eugene Simmons’ head, and fitting this whole episode into the much more complicated trajectory of his path back home.

Eugene and the woman are so firmly wrapped up in each other that they don’t seem to notice that the blinds pushed halfway open behind them or the glint of moonlight off the scope of a rifle that never strays from them. Five sighs, resigning himself to having to watch the shadow of this foolishness play out for a few more minutes while his knees complain loudly at being forced to endure just a little bit longer.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Five remembers kneeling on a hardwood floor next to a thirteen year old Vanya in the dead of night, in her cramped, barely more than a closet bedroom. It’s dark, with only a flashlight set up between them so their father won’t catch them talking after lights out. He can see the sheet music spread all around them in a circle, as he taps different notes and explains how different vibrations from the violin’s strings create different wavelengths that sound like the individual notes. Vanya launches into an explanation of musical theory, seeming to come more alive than she ever does in the day when her eyes are distant and her face is grey and withdrawn. The feel of the melody, transcribed into dots on paper, sparks a light in her. Five could swear she is practically glowing as she explains her world to him in the numerical way he can understand.

Inhaling sharply, Five yanks his focus out of the past. How could he let himself get so distracted by a memory? He’s not a fucking _amateur,_ and he has a job to do. He squints down the scope again, mentally tracing the line his bullet will travel to get from his gun into Eugene’s stupid skull.

_Here and now, you imbecile_ , he thinks, not even daring to blink as the two figures finally untangle themselves and head downstairs to the front door. The woman leaves first, adjusting her rumpled blouse and pulling her coat closed before heading down the street and disappearing into the distance. After a few minutes, Eugene pokes his head out of the door for the first time all day to check if the coast is clear.

Less than a second later, Five pulls the trigger. Dr. Eugene Simmons collapses to the ground, a bullet carving a neat path through the center of his forehead before exploding out the back, splattering the floor of his office with a mixture of blood, brains, and bone. By the time the neighbors turn their lights on and have a chance to take in the grisly scene on the doctor’s front steps, Five has already packed his gun away, cleared away any signs that he or anyone else was ever there at all, and disappeared in a flash of blue light.

_Just a little bit longer._

**The second dimension: a set of infinite first dimensional lines on a plane; width.**

The excruciating pain that has been his constant companion for roughly the past twenty four hours lets Five know that he really might have done it this time and actually gotten himself killed.

Five is somewhere around twenty six years old and wheezing like a ninety year old chainsmoker through the thin scarf wrapped over his nose and mouth. He half collapses against the crumbling wall he’d stumbled into and barely manages to turn it into a controlled fall as he sinks to the ground. Gritting his teeth, he slowly stretches out his right leg. His leg screams at him as he forces it to straighten so he can unwrap the filthy fabric tied around it.

Before he even pulls the bandage away, he can tell that it’s gotten worse. Even the thin dark streaks peeking above the fabric have darkened in the past few hours. When the last scrap falls to the ground, he can’t help cringing. The deep slice that cuts down to the bone of his shin is an inflamed mixture of red and purple that practically shouts “infection”.

The wind whistling through the annihilated structures surrounding him almost feels like a mockery, a stark reminder that there’s nothing and no one left to help him in this scenario.

This is… far from ideal.

Five shudders, the fever that had started hours ago steadily building until it’s impossible to keep himself from shivering. He leans his head back against the wall, feeling the grain of old bricks scrape against the back of his skull. He takes a few deep breaths, concentrating on the sensation of air moving slowly and steadily in and out of his lungs. It helps bring him back to center, back to focus, despite the stabbing pain radiating out of his leg that demands his attention.

He reaches out blindly with his left hand until he feels the warm metal of the wagon he’s been dragging all over creation and pulls it closer. It’s laden down with the few medical textbooks he’d been able to scrape together and fragments of maps of the city from before the end of the world. Three red circles stand out in stark contrast to the rest of the faded, greying paper: the pharmacies that may or may not have the antibiotics Five would need if he was going to live through the next twenty four hours. Number one had been a bust, and judging by the absolutely destroyed state of this building and all its neighbors, it wasn’t looking good for number two either.

Blinking his eyes open, it takes a worryingly long time for the world to come back into focus. The edges of his vision have gone hazy. It would be so easy to lay back down and fall asleep and let the pain in his leg consume him until there was nothing left.

Five clenches his jaw and mentally shoves the idea out of his head. He has a job to do, and Dolores would never forgive him if he left her at their little base camp and never came back.

He leans down and forces himself to prod the edges of the gash. Even a light brush of his fingertips nearly sends him over the edge. He chokes down the gasp of pain and reaches for the stack of books in the wagon. There’s a few books on first aid and emergency preparedness he’d scavenged from the remains of the library, but flipping through them to the pages on infections all recommend he seek medical attention after the fever and dizziness present as symptoms. If he starts to see pus, he’s going to have to lance and drain the wound himself.

“Useless,” he murmurs to himself, barely audible over the wind buffeting the walls. He looks across the street, where the second pharmacy was supposed to be. All that’s there is a black crater where it was blasted apart, and some piles of rubble that could have blown in from anywhere. Spacial jumping in the state he’s in is a laughable impossibility. If there’s any medical supplies left at all, he’ll have to drag himself and his stupid leg all the way over there. If not, he’ll have to move anyway. So really, there’s no point in waiting around.

The thought of standing up again makes him wince, or maybe that’s the fever. It’s getting hard to think around it, and he has a feeling he’d be wobbly on his feet even if there wasn’t a large chunk missing out of his right leg. He takes a few preparatory deep breaths and uses his left arm and leg to propel himself back onto his feet.

Oh, he’s been far too optimistic about his sense of equilibrium. His right leg buckles, absolutely refusing to support any weight. It sends him slamming back to his knees, but this time the open wound collides with the hard, unyielding earth.

The pain that explodes out of his leg is blinding, and he thinks he might have screamed, but it’s hard to tell as he’s punted out of consciousness so fast he doesn’t even feel his head hit the ground.

It feels like he drifts through the dark much longer than he should have, and by the time he manages to crack his eyelids open a sliver, his only thought is that he’s running out of options. His leg is positively _shrieking_ , and it’s all he can do to keep the sob building in his chest from bursting out. At an infinitesimally slow speed, he raises his leg off the ground and pushes himself to hands and knees. The voice that constantly whispers at the back of his mind that he should just give in and die like everything else is sounding more convincing that ever.

The world is wobbling, he can’t stop shaking through the fever and the pain and every other _god awful weight_ that threatens to drag him back down to the ground, and he knows if he falls now he’ll never get back up.

Five, panting and shivering, squints at the destroyed pharmacy a few yards away. Most of its structure has been reduced to rubble that’s going to be hell to crawl over on the miniscule chance that some kind of medicine survived an apocalyptic explosion. Even with the way his brain seems to be sliding around in his head, making everything tilt dangerously, he thinks he can make out the twisted shapes of old shelves that used to line the walls.

He sighs, and by gritting his teeth and barreling through, hauls himself back onto one wobbly leg. If he hops, and doesn’t trip again, he can make it.

_Just a little bit further._

**The third dimension: a set of infinite second dimensional planes in a space; depth.**

The first place Five ran to when he landed in the apocalypse was the Academy. For a second after arriving, he’d short circuited, the blazing fires and swirling ash somehow causing a complete schism in his mind between what he saw and what he felt. He could feel his body running back in the direction he’d come, finding the building he’d _just left, only a few seconds ago,_ now reduced to rubble and ash.

It was… strange, hearing himself calling for Vanya, then Ben, then his dad. He could hear his voice, but it wasn’t him speaking. The disconnect only widened as his gaze drifted to the bodies scattered outside the front steps, and the tell-tale umbrella tattoos on the inside of their wrists.

From there, his memory is oddly hazy and full of long spaces where he knows he must have moved from one place to another, but he can’t quite recall the journey in between. He remembers dragging four bodies out from underneath mountains of rock and shrapnel, but he doesn’t recall how long it took. Judging by the absolutely shredded skin of his palms and fingers, he must have been digging for hours or even days. He knows laid the four of them out in a line and then sat for a long time, hardly daring to move and just letting the ash and smoke blow across his skin. Then, when his parched throat finally scratched through the cold numbness settled around his mind, he must have wandered off in search of water.

The second place he ran to, though he doesn’t remember exactly when he left or how he got there, was the ruins of the grocery store a few blocks away from the Academy. It was more thoroughly wrecked than the Academy had been, and the bodies littered inside it were hardly more than blood splatters crushed beneath fallen struts of metal.

The owner’s name was Horace. He had offered Five some day-old donuts when he’d snuck out of the house a few weeks ago and walked by as Horace was closing up shop. Five had the distant thought that one of the blood splatters must be him. He dug through the rubble with red stained hands, pushing aside burnt piles that were once food before finally discovering a stack of water bottles that remained miraculously protected from whatever cataclysmic event had leveled civilization.

Drinking lukewarm water for the first time in god knows how long must have sparked some sort of life back into Five’s brain, because he remembers finally wrapping his mangled hands to protect them against any further damage and beginning to scavenge for any other supplies that might have survived besides a handful of ash-coated water bottles.

The next few weeks were simultaneously a flurry of activity and an uncomfortably blank void in Five’s memory. From what he can recall, he’d found tarps and strung them up, creating a shelter that wouldn’t cave in and crush him to death in his sleep. Then, he began moving whatever helpful scraps of civilization he could find into his tent, stockpiling any sealed cans, vials of pills, and bottles of water he scrounged up from the dust. He doesn’t remember sleeping during this period, although he knows he must have at some point, because he remembers waking up covered in layers of accumulated ash after collapsing from exhaustion on and off for what could have been weeks but might have been months.

Interspersed throughout this blank stretch of memory are flashes of… something else that Five can’t quite identify. He knows that he tried jumping. Every day, he tried to push back against the barrier that kept him firmly stuck in the apocalypse. And every day, after trying and trying again and failing and failing again, the flat expanse of numbness wrapped around his brain would spark and his chest would start to ache and tears would start to form… before falling quiet once again and sliding beneath the comfort of the empty haze.

And now, he’s here. After collecting a few meager supplies and looping a canteen of water around his shoulder, he’s finally managed to piece together the thoughts that he should be looking for the rest of his siblings. Or anyone at all, really.

He hadn’t realized how long he’d been standing here in front of the ruins of the library, lost in thought as he tried to piece together his oddly patchy memory. The library is just a few piles of rubble away from being considered completely annihilated, but since he can still make out the impressions of where four walls used to be as well as part of a ceiling, he’s willing to consider this a win.

The front door is gone. He clammers over the twisted metal of the frame and instinctively heads towards the furthest section of the right wing, where the quantum physics books were kept. A much clearer memory of sneaking out with Ben to grab as many textbooks as they could carry back to the Academy nudges at him before evaporating into the nothingness that pervades his mind now.

He carefully picks his way to the back of the building, careful not to disturb anything more than necessary in case he brings the whole roof down on himself. The computers have all been destroyed, and the very flammable paperback books haven’t fared much better. He glances over the messy piles of toppled books, most of them burnt beyond recognition. There’s a few scattered pages filled with numbers and equations that could be helpful, so he follows the trail of paper back further into the biography section.

The books up front took the brunt of the fire damage, while the ones back here seemed to have been a bit more protected. He crouches down among the books, picking them up absentmindedly. There’s one about Harriet Tubman, one about Steven Hawking, and…

He freezes, hand outstretched and heart leaping up into his throat.

_Extra Ordinary: My Life as Number Seven._

_By Vanya Hargreeves._

There’s a moment where he can’t hear anything but the _thump, thump, thump_ of his own heartbeat. He carefully, almost reverently, brushes the tips of his fingers over the cover. The book doesn’t appear to have been burnt at all, but he feels like even the slightest touch will make it crumble apart and fade into dust.

The sad brown eyes of his sister stare up at him from underneath straight cut bangs. His hands tremble as he settles into the dirt clutching the book. He turns it over. There’s a headshot of a woman he’s never seen before but must be adult Vanya centered on the back cover.

For some unfathomable reason, everything around him seems sharper and more distinct. There’s a pounding thrum of… something that cuts through the haze he’s been living in for the past few weeks. He’s more aware of his sliced hands, his scraped knees, the dull throb of hunger that knots his stomach and the thirst that turns his throat to sandpaper.

He cracks the book open to a random page in the middle. He’ll never understand how, but the first two words he sees are “Ben” and “Dead”. He doesn’t read the whole page. It doesn’t matter.

His brother is dead, well before the rest of them, and Five wasn’t there to save him. He wasn’t there to save _any_ of them.

He had known, on the surface, that his family was dead, but he hadn’t felt it until now. The ache in his heart isn’t new, but the raw, unfiltered emotion that carves through him like a dagger is.

A gasp bursts out of his chest, and then another. He doesn’t understand what’s happening, but he does know that the protective haze clouding his brain and his heart is fading away and suddenly he’s leaning forward, Vanya’s book clutched in his arms as he curls up in a ball. He coughs, chokes on his own heaving breaths and the ash in the air, while the full weight of how alone he is swells up inside him. It hurts, it hurts, _it hurts._

He’s far too dehydrated to produce many tears, but that doesn’t stop his shoulders from shaking through a heaving sob. He tries to wrangle his feelings, retreat back into the comfort of the cold, clinical numbness, but now that it’s fading he can’t pull it back. He thinks about the four bodies he hauled out of the wreckage, laying in a line, imagines two more next to them, and shudders through the pulse of heartache that radiates through him. Once again, he presses his head into the dirt and lets time slip-stream around him while his body breaks down in tears. It’s too painful to bear, but he couldn’t save a single one of his siblings and at the very least they deserve to have someone mourn them.

It’s long after he’s run out of what little water he had left that the sobs finally start to subside, leaving him trembling in the dust. Some of the haze is back, insisting that he pull himself to his feet and go track down some kind of liquid before he’s too weak and parched to move. He swipes at his eyes, smearing dust through the tear tracks, desperately clinging to the raspy ache of dehydration as motivation to get himself out of the library and back on the move.

He isn’t ready to let the numbness go entirely, but he does let the cracks of _Ben, Vanya, Klaus, Diego, Allison, Luther_ stay.

_Just a little bit deeper._

**The fourth dimension: a set of infinite third dimensional spaces along a timeline; duration, or Time.**

Eleven year old Ben startles violently and drops his flashlight as Five pops into existence at the foot of his bed without warning.

“ _Jesus,_ Five,” he says, closing his book with a snap. “If Dad hears you out of your room after hours…”

“I’ve been thinking,” Five says, ignoring him. He crawls over and settles next to Ben. “Practically speaking, none of us should exist.”

“Physical evidence would suggest that’s not the case.” It looks like he’s not going to be getting through another chapter of _Invisible Man_ like he’d been planning, so he sets the book on his bedside table.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Five continues. “The seven of us combined break at least half of the fundamental laws of nature, and that’s just at a surface glance. I bet if we went through our physics and biology textbooks, we’d find plenty of examples of natural laws that we just… don’t seem to adhere to.” He adjusts his position on the bed, wriggling into a more comfortable position. “Think about it. Diego tosses the laws of gravity out the window with his curving knifes and doesn’t need oxygen like everything else on the planet. Allison can hijack all of human psychology and the concept of free will if she says the right phrase, making her a philosophical nightmare. Fuck, Klaus has done the impossible and proven the existance of an afterlife. Even Vanya was seemingly created out of thin air. All of us are scientific impossibilities!”

“So you’re saying science says I shouldn’t have eldritch beings living in my stomach? I wish someone would let them know.”

Five doesn’t seem to appreciate the sarcasm. “That’s not what I’m saying, Ben. I’m saying, instead of having to restart every field of science from scratch because of the nature of our existence, what if there is a layer of scientific reasoning that explains why we can do what we do without resorting to Klaus’s answer of ‘it’s magic I guess’?”

Ben raises an eyebrow. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess you’ve been thinking about this for a while?”

Five nods. “I’ve done some research. Mainly focusing on my own teleportation, and some digging into your whole situation.” He gestures vaguely at Ben’s stomach. “I had the thought that, with some actual scientific underpinnings for our understanding of ourselves, we’d be able to… predict the full extent of our abilities.”

“Elaborate.” Ben thinks he knows where Five is going with this, but he has to make sure.

“I mean we could figure out what we can actually do  _without_ Dad’s ‘training’.”

The temperature in the room seems to drop a few degrees. Ben’s mouth goes dry, and he has to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth before answering. “Wha – really?”

“It’s obvious that Dad’s methodology barely amounts to more than pushing and pushing until we crack and hoping we do something new and better next time,” Five says. There’s a hint of acid in his tone that makes Ben squirm uncomfortably even though Dad can’t hear it.

“Five, I don’t know…”

“Think about it, Ben,” Five says, turning so Ben has to look directly into his eyes. “If we can come up with a mathematical or scientific solution for how, exactly, we all can do what we do, then we won’t have to just guess and hope Dad never pushes us too far.”

The thought of never having to stand in a cemented room, surrounded by dozens of training dummies, letting the monsters burst out of him and wreak havoc before desperately trying to reel them back in, sparks a light in Ben’s heart. He’s been burned by optimism before, though, so he crosses his arms over his stomach and tries to smother it. “And how do you know Dad hasn’t already figured out these solutions, if they even exist?”

“If he had, then why would he…” The question, _why would Dad do this to us on purpose_ , hangs in the air between them both. There’s a moment of tense silence as their breath hitches, before Five continues, “Anyway, I went to the library to start researching wormholes.”

“You think your jumps are wormholes?”

“Let me finish,” Five says. “I did a lot of reading about super string theory and the manipulation of matter in different dimensions.”

“I’ve read about that too,” Ben says, pushing all thoughts of Dad to the back of his mind. “You think you’re linking two different locations in the space time continuum somehow, and just… hopping through.”

“That’s the general idea. The idea of wormholes is theoretically solid, even if modern physicists can’t build their own. The main issue is holding the center of the wormhole open without gravity collapsing both ends into black holes, but I had some ideas about exotic matter and quantum fluctuations that I must be utilizing to jump through space.”

“Jesus, Five, the amount of energy you would have to use for each jump, if you’re exerting enough force to counteract the gravity of a black hole…”

“It explains why I’m so fucking tired after training. I had some ideas about how your own powers might be some kind of wormhole too, for your monsters to reach through. I also…” He trails off, pressing his lips together into a straight white line.

Ben blinks at him. “You also what?”

“If I can jump through the third dimension, why not the fourth?” Five asks. He spits out the words like he’s trying not to trip over them in his rush to tell Ben. “Bending space time to move through space, and then… time.”

“You think you can _time travel_?”

“Like I said, I’ve been thinking about this for a while and theoretically speaking, the equations check out. If my predictions are correct, I should be able to make my jumps through all the dimensions, spatial and temporal.” Five’s hands are clenched into fists where they rest on his knees. “Think about it, Ben. If I could jump through time, I could get out of here. I could take you with me and we wouldn’t ever have to do any of Dad’s _training_ ever again.” 

There’s a hard determination in Five’s gaze. Ben knows that if there’s one thing Five believes in, it’s the firm foundation of mathematics and his own numerical reasoning. He takes one look at him and knows, just as deep as Five’s belief in his numbers, that Five will try to jump through time sometime soon, no matter the myriad of consequences that flare in Ben's own anxious mind.

“It… Five, it sounds impossible.” Ben isn’t sure if he’s talking about time travel or living a life away from Dad and his missions. Before Five can open his mouth to protest, Ben pushes ahead. “But, if anyone could do it, it would be you.”

Five sucks in a breath, and leans back against the wall. “Just give me a little bit more time, Ben, and I’ll figure it out. I’ll figure it _all_ out.”

Ben nods and quietly leans back as well, letting their arms press together as they both stare into the dark room, lost in thought.

_Just a little bit more time._

 

**Author's Note:**

> actually the real tragedy is how much research I, an english major, put into understanding quantum physics only to end up cutting MOST of it rip


End file.
